The Long Road to Equality
No, this is not a rant about political correctness whether it be women in the workplace or racial injustice. Rather, this article is about how it took me a long time to make the antagonist of my counselling novel have almost as much screen-time as the protagonist.
My decision to find the right equilibrium was inspired by my sympathy for Eric Stoltz after I learned how unfair that it was for him to be fired from Back to the Future. It’s a shame that my novel got rejected by so many literary agents in the first few years of the last decade. Stoltz still had the charisma to make a middle-aged comeback on par with Robert Downey Jr. and Bryan Cranston. Seriously, did you see what he looked like when he was promoting Caprica in April 2009.
I started to think about what would happen if no Hong Kong film director wanted to adapt my novel. Because I wanted Eric to play the villain, I thought about him directing. I went about changing the structure of the screenplay (and the novel as a result) so that the villain no longer had a small role. This was different because a villain, especially in a thriller or an action movie, tends to have more or less a supporting role stature if not a co-lead. Originally, the novel’s villain appeared at the beginning and end of the main narrative (much like the villain in American Shaolin) because the emphasis was on the relationship between the counsellor and the victim. At any rate, the villain in my novel went from extended cameo status to leading man (or co-star) potential.
Eric Stoltz’s lead performance in Some Kind of Wonderful was 10/10 because he conveyed forty expressions. Some people say he was wooden, but his expressions were done in a minimalistic way because he was playing a mild-mannered teenager. The difference is that he, for my movie, would be playing a glamorous megalomaniac with outlandish expressions. The script was already changed from action to primarily non-action because I wanted to showcase all of Jennifer Lawrence’s facial range (she’s also 10/10). In the beginning, I wanted to create the ultimate action movie in terms of choice of weapons and locations. However, J-Law has so many underused facial expressions that the initial approach would only have worked when working with a less talented actress.
Back to Eric Stoltz as the choice of villain, even if a film studio wanted Eric to take up no more than two reels of film (approximately 20 minutes) like Lance Henriksen being forced to step out of the spotlight in Hard Target for long stretches of time, this wouldn’t be a problem because Anthony Hopkins made an impact in Silence of the Lambs despite being in it for 16 minutes. That’s one of the few films to win both best actor and actress Oscars. Sadly, Eric is getting too old to play the villain that I had in mind. He’s getting to the point where he’s starting to look like Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. I may just have to zone in on Brie Larson since she has untapped villainess potential. Changing the gender would serve me well in the long run because too many people are complaining about there not being enough female-driven films. Woman versus man in an action/thriller context has been done to death (especially in Hong Kong), but woman versus woman? Not so much.
